Working to Laugh

Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues

By (author) James M. Thomas

Not available to order

Publication date:

21 January 2015

Length of book:

194 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739189566

For decades, stand-up comedy has been central to the imbrication of popular culture and political discourse, reshaping the margins of political critique, and often within the contexts of urban nightlife entertainment. In Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, James M. Thomas (JT) provides an ethnographic analysis of urban nightlife sites where this popular form of entertainment occurs. Examining the relationship between the performance, the venue, and the social actors who participate in these scenes, JT demonstrates how stand-up venues function as both enablers and constrainers of social difference, including race, class, gender, and heteronormativity, within the larger urban nightlife environment. JT’s analysis of a professional comedy club and a sub-cultural bar that hosts a weekly comedy show illuminates the full range of stand-up comedy in the American cultural milieu, from the highly organized, routinized, and predictable format of the professional venue, to the more unpredictable, and in some cases, cutting edge format of the amateur show.
In a field saturated with hermeneutical accounts of why stand-up comics do as they do, how their discourse functions, and the political efficacy of their work, James M. Thomas’s Working to Laugh is a welcome re-training of the scholarly lens.... Thomas’s text...is well-written and describes his sociological study, methods, and results vividly. His forceful but tempered attention to social inequalities, which I suspect stems from his academic background in race and women’s studies, is an ever-present companion in this book’s scrutiny of American comedy. But it is his serious theoretical investment and interest in affect and assemblage theory that really makes this book unique.... Working to Laugh is an important contribution to American humor studies. Thomas’s sociological and ethnographic accounts model a solid academic reading of nightlife comedy that combines theory and practice in an approachable and principled way, providing a lucid and accessible demon-stration to scholars investigating American humor, Western capitalism and culture, and race and gender studies.